Technical Benefits of Oracle Cloud

DSP-Explorer's CTO Phil Brown makes you look twice at Oracle Cloud. OCI has evolved rapidly over the last few years, becoming one of the best Cloud services available in the market. This blog explores exactly how it has been 'reloaded'.

One of the great things about Public Cloud is that the service providers are always enhancing their offerings. Blink and you may miss it. I’ve being using Oracle Cloud since inception and the service I used maybe 4 years ago would be unrecognisable to the one today. If you took a brief look at Oracle Cloud and thought it wasn’t ‘up to it’ then you need to maybe take another look. In this blog I will be taking a look at the technical benefits of Oracle Cloud.

Regions

Oracle has been expanding its region footprint and continues to do so with the latest region in San Jose. With 19 public regions and an additional bunch of US and UK Gov Cloud, Oracle continues to expand. However, probably more importantly from a consumption perspective, Oracle maintains a consistent pricing strategy across all those regions. Having global coverage is one thing; but choosing a region takes a moment; trying to work out how much region x will cost over region y and trying to budget Cloud spend based on that isn’t something you need to do with Oracle Cloud.

Virtual Machines

Do you want a x4.large medium, or a y7.4x5.small memory optimised with or without ephemeral storage. Choice is a good thing but an unending array of slightly subtlety different VM shapes can mean making a choice becomes too time consuming and pricing becomes more complex. With simplicity in mind Oracle have made the choice of VMs very simple. You do have VMs, Bare Metal, HPC and GPU but 90% of workloads will be moving to standard VMs. With that in mind you have a simple choice of around 10 different shapes; from low cost AMD based VMs to something more substantial like a 24 core 240GB VM.Standard.2.24. However, more recently Oracle have introduced flexible shapes which basically allows you to choose the core count and specifies the corresponding memory accordingly. Need a 3 core, 10 cores, or 13 core (hmm unlucky maybe) then you can.

When you combine this with the fact that all storage is performant by default and that you can choose to throttle down or up that performance dynamically, it makes choosing VMs and pricing them super easy…barely an inconvenience.

Enterprise Public Cloud

Oracle has been repeating the mantra of ‘Enterprise’ Public Cloud for some time. As Oracle has a history of running on-premises those who are familiar with Oracle technology and the infrastructure it runs on will have certain expectations. Those who are also familiar with Public Cloud may also have certain expectations therefore depending on what your use to will alter your expectation…

Used Public Cloud but not Oracle Cloud then?

• Storage by default is performant
• Data egress is free up to 10TB each month and completely free over Fast Connect
• Load balancers don’t cost for the data they process
• VPN, NAT and Internet Gateways are free
• Pricing is simplified and hugely competitive

Thinking you might miss something from on-premises?

• You can share block storage between VMs to create clusters like you did with your SAN
• You can easily clone / copy VMs like your virtualised infrastructure
• NFS is a simplified service and managed
• Tape storage is now Cloud storage but it’s cheaper, bigger and more resilient
• You’re not relinquishing control just simplifying repetitive administration
• You can move out as easily as moving in
• Security is built in from a service, tooling and physical perspective
• It’s like running a data centre but with an on off switch

Oracle has built a compelling offering; if you’re in the Cloud or moving to the Cloud you might want to take a look; there is no harm in being better informed. Discover more about Oracle Cloud Migration here.